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Monday, March 27, 2017

The exhibition about the micro-press Patricia Farrell and I run, Ship of Fools, in the Arts Centre at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, has now closed. But I shall be posting photos on this blog soon (after the videos of the readings from the Sheppard Symposium) documenting the exhibition (and therefore the press). Visit the hub post to take you to all the posts concerning the exhibition here.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

The last time I saw Roy was at the Manchester Literary Festival on18thOctober 2010 (I spoke with Fleur Adcock, Jon Glover, Michael Symmons Roberts, Peter
Robinson, and Jeffrey Wainwright, while Ian Pople chaired). Roy sat in the audience and didn't read or speak which felt odd (because we were reading and speaking) but he was was as witty as ever, close up and quiet. The text of of my piece was published on Eyewear and may be read here.

I began: 'The invitation to speak about a
single poem by Roy Fisher already makes me feel that violence has been
inflicted upon the considerable body of work we now possess. Such stringency
favours the isolated poem as against the sequence; it seems to me that much of
Roy Fisher’s brilliance reveals itself in extended – often serial – works. The
single poem conserves its energies in a centrifugal way, looking to itself for
its sense of form, finding just enough confirmation of its own viability, its
vitality, its need to exist, from its own resources. It seems to me that what
we used to call free verse (and we haven’t found a less clumsy term to replace
it) requires more of that energy. The poem hangs together by the formal and
semantic magnetism of its parts. Fisher speaks of the short poem – and he was
much given to the form in the 1970s – as being somewhat like the 3 minute max
recordings of his favourite Chicago
jazz heroes. Familiar patterns, laced with unfamiliarity. Tight, concise, limited,
complete...' Read the rest!

Note: I am at the moment writing a new poem for Roy, not quite in memoriam, because I wrote it on the train to work in a state where I didn't know whether to believe the single tweet I'd read about his death,, which seemed to appear and then disappear before I left. But the appearance of one of the Roy Fisher doubles who populate Britain (cousins all of the 'actor' who plays the narrator in The Ship's Orchestra) on the bus seemed to be a representative of the neither living nor dead. That's what the poem is about, a veritable Roy Fisher theme in a Roy Fisher wrapping, I hope. I hope it also sees the light of day. By the time I got to work, tweets from authoritative sources acknowedged his passing. And then, later in the day, word of David Kennedy's death. Then later: the London attack. For today, the poem is on the drawing board, as is another Wyatt/Petrarch poem, written this morning, one which glancingly mentions the terrible (but foiled) attack on Westminster Bridge. 14.19

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Roy Fisher wrote a poetry that foregrounds its own
artificiality, and this itself is foregrounded in the poems of the 1970s,
published in The Thing About Joe Sullivan in 1978. Indeed, foregrounding,
in the technical sense, involves ‘all salient linguistic phenomena which in
some way cause the reader’s attention to shift from the paraphrasable content
of a message ... to a focus on the message itself.’ 44 It resists
naturalization, in a way of holding a text in suspension, so that its qualities
of saying are extended, its fixity in the meaning of the said, delayed.

‘The Only Image’ consists of a
series of simple propositions concerning its opening observation, and is as
fundamental to Fisher’s poetics as Williams’ similar framing of the
wheelbarrow, or even Stevens’ of his snowman, are to theirs:

Salts work
their way

to the outside
of a plant pot

and dry
white.(DLD, p. 106)

This becomes ‘the only image’ of
the title, the only counter in its metaphoric change. ‘The rest,’ the poem
states, ‘comes as a variable that shifts/in any part, or vanishes.’ (DLD,
p. 106) Linguistic relations, particularly those of metaphor and simile, are as
arbitrary and free as they had been in The Cut Pages, although here
Fisher is remarking upon the process. The only image can be related, through
comparison, to any other. (The ‘salts’ are also, paradoxically, a metaphor for
the possibilities of metaphor.)

I
can

compare what I
like to the salts,

to the pot, if
there’s a pot....

The salts I
can compare

to anything
there is.

Anything.(DLD, p. 106 )

Metaphor, so distrusted by the Movement Orthodoxy (and used
only for domestic and limited defamiliarizations by the Martian poets of the
1980s and after), has a clearly subversive, rather than decorative, rhetorical role. In
Riceour’s formulation, it

brings together things that do
not go together and by means of the apparent misunderstanding it causes a new,
hitherto unnoticed, relation of meaning to spring up between the terms that
previous systems of classification had ignored or not allowed.

Fisher has called the poem a ‘formal “work-out”’, adding,
‘For me it’s a work of delight in making the picture of the salts on the
plant-pot and using them for that great void’ of linguistic relation which lies
open to the poet, the general economy of language’s surplus; since it can be
compared to anything, no metaphor or simile need be proffered.46 It
is this facility of language that allows for the saying to remain elusive to
the power of the said that must inevitably embody it, a game of hide and seek
between the metaphor’s fixed vehicle and its indeterminate tenors.

‘It is
Writing’ defiantly asserts its textuality; it argues for a poetry that
frustrates moral interpretation, that implicitly supports the argument of ‘The
Only Image’. Poetry becomes foregrounded as the subject of its own discourse,
even while the temptations of artifice (in being able to transform suffering)
are being ostensibly disavowed.

I mistrust the
poem in its hour of success,

a thing
capable of being

tempted by
ethics into the wonderful.(DLD,
p. 108)

Similar scepticism about the function of poetry is evident
in the conditional opening lines of ‘ If I Didn’t’, which denies the
possibility of foregrounding its artifice, in one sense, in the very act of
undertaking it in another.

If I didn’t
dislike

mentioning
works of art

I could say

the poem has
always

already
started, the parapet

snaking away,
its grey line guarding

the football
field and the sea ...

-the parapet

has always
already started

snaking away,
its grey line

guarding the
football field and the sea.(DLD,
p. 112)

It is almost as though it were not possible to deal with the
epiphany of involuntary memory (‘the looking down/ between the moving frames’)
without ‘mentioning works of art’ (DLD, p. 112) The relineation of the
repeated report of the perception of the parapet foregrounds the fact of its
necessary mediation by a ‘work of art’. The ‘poem’ here contrasts with its
anterior memory which, as memory, is also an event. The enjambement of the
first occurrence of this phrase attempts to disguise the continuous presence of
a particular moment of recollection.

Part of
Fisher’s impulse to de-Anglicize England, is realized through foregrounding the
aestheticism of the gaze; years after City he is still on the number 15
bus, thinking with Birmingham and the Midlands. ‘In the Black Country’ uses the
simple declarative style Fisher developed during the 1970s, and even opens with
a simile, metaphor’s weak cousin.

Dudley from
the Castle keep

looks like a
town by Kokoschka,

one town
excited

by plural
perspectives

into four of
five

landscapes of
opportunity

each on offer

under a
selection of skies.(P55-87, p. 106)

Fisher distances the empirical Dudley by prolonging the
reader’s apprehension of the town, a classic act of defamiliarization. The last
line, ‘Art’s marvellous’, is sardonic about the use of art to achieve this,
even while the reader is made aware of the possibilities of the actual Midlands
town through the incongruous art of Kokoschka; the temptation of the wonderful
is suspended. Dudley achieves ‘clarity’ through the very ‘confusion’ of its
confrontation with the expressionist style of Kokoschka’s landscapes; the
reader’s perception of both has been revitalized and altered; an alternative
ethic to that of the wonderful and the marvellous is asserted.

There is a certain instability in
the textual voice that ‘mistrusts’ the poem. It is most often a disembodied
voice, a position, that the reader reads. As Barthes writes, ‘Linguistically,
the author is never more than the instance saying I; language knows a
“subject”, not a “person”.’ 47 Fisher dramatizes this lightly, in a
poem which, complete with title and dedication opens:

Of
the Empirical Self and for Me

for M.E.

In my poems
there’s seldom

any I or
you –

you know me, Mary.(DLD, p. 109)

Thus the poetic discourse
opens self-consciously with a series of puns on its title and the name of the
dedicatee, a playfulness at the level of the signifier unusual in Fisher’s work
that represents the unstable nature of the self that is barely represented in
the text. The empirical self is cut off from its own ‘me’. ‘Me’ is also the
‘M.E.’, the addressed Mary of the text, who is also, ‘linguistically’ as
Barthes would say, the position ‘you’. Pronominal usage of ‘I’ and ‘you’ is
rejected, but only by their very assertion; ‘the “I” is always located
unlocatably,’ as Bell and Lland assert. 48 Each becomes a possible
position for the other and the first person plural is fastidiously avoided to
preclude intersubjective agreement. However, despite this playful beginning,
rhetorical austerity returns; attention shifts from the instability of the self
to the nature of that self’s self-confirming apparatus of sense data and
perceptual instabilities. Merleau-Ponty claimed that the blending of
intersubjective perceptions confirmed the world; Fisher seems to argue the
opposite. The poem is concerned, moreover, with that area of tension between
the fictive and the real already examined, though now from the point of view of
the discrepancies between the self and its perceptual construction in making
the world. The night, innocently presented at first, nevertheless limits
perception until the empirical selves are once more unstable: ‘two invisible
ghosts’. (DLD, p. 109) The senses have defeated their own claims to
clarity and replaced it with comic confusion.

A tall man
passes

with what
looks like a black dog.

He stares at
the milk, and says

It’s nice to be able

to drink a cup of

coffee outside at night ... (DLD,
p. 109)

Once the man has vanished, this confusion prompts the
question, ‘ So-/ What kind of a world?’ (DLD, p. 109) The world is
constructed by agents of perception with all their phenomenological
indeterminacies; reality is a spectral trace, a mark (those frequent Fisher
lexes), something almost artificial, photographically printed:
‘lightning-strokes repeatedly/bang out their reality-prints’. (DLD, p.
109)

‘The Poet’s Message’ continues
this enquiry by opening with two parallel questions about the function of
subjectivity and text, what kind of ‘message’ and what kind of ‘man/comes in a
message?’ (DLD, p. 108) The second of the questions seems more engaging
and elicits not so much a clear response as a teasing confession. Its tone is
assertive, while its own ‘message’ – the first unanswered question - is
curiously oblique and conditional.

I would

get into a
message if I could

and come
complete

to where I can
see

what’s across
the park:

and leave my
own position

empty for you
in its frame. (DLD, p.108)

The self
is only the validating principle of the poem insofar as it is an absence, or a
‘position’ in Barthes’ sense. It stands behind the point where the scene
focuses on the artificial retina of a camera, and its ‘message’ would ideally
be the unmediated view of a characteristic park, which it knows to be an
impossibility. The view is blocked by the absent self’s paradoxical
self-consciousness. Not much of a man comes in a message, but enough, in this
case, to frustrate realistic description.

City had, of course, used
memories of a vanishing Birmingham, but the role of memory and its loss, its
correlative shadow, become problematic in Fisher’s work of the 1970s. Most of
these poems are quite slender with little evidence of metrical contour, and
consist of brief, almost gnomic, propositions upon their subjects. In the case
of ‘On the Open Side’, Fisher attempts ‘getting Proust down to matchbox proportions’,
as he jokingly put it. Not only is the memory fleeting and
involuntary, it seems eternal, pre-linguistic, and – more importantly –
autonomous:

-
the other life,

the endless
other life,

endless beyond
the beginning

... holds and
suddenly presents

a particular, but totally insignificant scene to the mind. (P55-87,
p. 111) ‘That was all,’ the poem concludes, ‘Something the other life wanted -
/ I hadn’t kept it.’ (P55-87, p. 111) The self is disrupted by this
autonomous image, strangely significant with its haunting insignificance, its
doubtful value. Elsewhere, in surprise, the narrator says,

So I start

at the single
recurrence of a counter

I expect never
to need.(P55-87, p.
135)

Unlike Proust, the recurrence does not involve the recovery
of the past. Fisher is ‘fascinated with memory,’ because of its non utilitarian
nature; ‘I’m impressed by its disregard for time and narrative sense. Or even
for the simplest categories of thought’. The ‘counter’ can’t be
used or exchanged in anything like the market this economic metaphor suggests.
Its patterns of association offer not the old, but the new; they do not so much
recover the past, as flood the present with the blank screen of nostalgia.

In many ways the
obsessive concern with Birmingham (the narrator’s need to think with it as yet
another counter) has dictated that later poems, such as the more discursive
‘Wonders of Obligation’, ‘Introit: 12 November 1958’ from A Furnace, his
most ambitious long work of 1986, and ‘Six Texts for a Film’ (1994), are
re-memberings of the body of the city, and constitute what Peter Barry calls
Fisher’s ‘“composite-epic” of urban material’.

‘Handsworth Liberties’ is yet another such attempt, in The
Thing About Joe Sullivan, and is one of Fisher’s most impressive sequences.
Like all such sequences, the 16 parts do not develop narratively, as they
negotiate adolescent memories of particular locations in Birmingham that Fisher
associated with particular pieces of music. Indeed it is the street that dominates
the sequence, not the people, who appear only as traces upon it: ‘The
place is full of people./It is thin. They are moving’. (P55-87, p.
118)Even when

A mild blight,
sterility,

the comfort of
others'

homecoming

is invoked, it is still the incomplete yet immobile
environment that claims the poem’s attention:

apart from the
pavement

asphalt and
grit are spread

for floors;
there are railings,

tarred. It is
all

unfinished and
still.(P55-87, p. 121)

Other poems from the sequence consciously de-Anglicize
memories of the 1940s, as had parts of City. The procedure to refuse to
name objects which then appear indeterminate, a form of semantic indeterminacy
developed from The Cut Pages, is introduced to deal with the
characteristic material. Thus the presentation of the city horizon, which
certainly resembles the northern prospect of one of the clues of ‘Starting to
Make a Tree’, ‘pale new towers in the north/right on the line’, operates here
through non-descriptiveness, as it were. One of Fisher’s favourite descriptive
adjectives is ‘non-descript’.

It all

radiates
outwards

in a
lightheaded air

without image.
(P55-87, p. 117)

Realism is forced, not just into the strategies of
foregrounded artifice, but into a register of ‘waves’, since there is no presentable
‘image’, a version of the ‘traces’ and ‘marks’ already noted. Occasionally a
‘flicker’ might reveal a partial, but insignificant, image.

There is a
world.

It has been
made

out of the
tracks of waves

broken against
the rim

and coming
back awry; at the final

flicker they
are old grass and fences. (P55-87, p. 117)

Sometimes, ‘At the end of the familiar’, there is stark
realist enumeration but with the barest of elaboration:

brick,
laurels, a cokeheap

across from
the cemetery gate –

a printing
works and a small

cycle factory;
hard tennis courts.(P55-87, p.
121)

But this exists in a state of tension with formalist
abstraction: ‘With not even a whiff of peace/tranquilities ride the dusk’. (P55-87,
p.119)

Shklovsky’s formalism is easily
mistaken for pure aestheticism, especially when he declares that the ‘object’
that undergoes defamiliarization is not important.52 As has been
seen the object – usually Birmingham - for Fisher is very important;
there are social and political reasons for his de-Anglicizing. The Russian
formalists themselves were rigorously criticized, both by Trotsky and the
Bakhtin Circle before the Stalinist years enveloped them all. Shklovsky’s 1940
volume Mayakovsky and His Circle, was a rejoinder to that criticism, in
which he reformulates defamiliarization. He repeats part of his 1917 essay,
particularly Tolstoy’s claims that ‘if the entire life of many people is lived
unconsciously, then that life, in effect, did not exist’. 53 This
has an obvious existential and moral dimension often missed in readings of the
original essay (as is its insistence upon form). Shklovsky developed this
(opportunely) with an examination of some statements of Lenin. His conclusion
is that Lenin took an interest in ‘eccentricism in art, a skeptical attitude
toward the conventional, and the illogic of the unusual’. 54 Although
Shklovsky is trying to prove that ‘eccentric’ art can be ‘realistic’, he is
also showing its political potential, that ‘the absurdity of the capitalist
world could be shown through methods of eccentric art’.55 One avenue
for this radical art would lead to the dramatic alienation techniques of
Brecht’s poetics of the theatre; the other would concentrate upon destroying
habitual associations within thought and language. In ‘Handsworth Liberties’ –
the pun on the second word is intentional – moments of eccentric illumination
occur during

a trip between
two locations

ill-conceived,
raw, surreal

outgrowths of
common sense, almost

merging one
into the other. (P55-87, p. 118)

Such a meeting of the extraordinary within the quotidian
produces

on an ordinary
day a brief

lightness,
charm between realities;

on a good day,
a break

life can flood
in and fill.(P55-87, p. 119)

As Shklovsky argued, the most radical art works are not
those that thematize revolution or class war. Indeed thematizing itself imposes
a limit upon the possibilities of expression.

Memories
and things in Fisher’s poetry of this time are often invested with an
additional autonomy from reference; things achieve a necessary freedom as the
recognisable world is phenomenologically reduced:

Travesties of
the world

come out of
the fog

and rest at
the boundary.(P55-87, p. 122)

These ‘travesties’ are not quite visual or tactile, but
synaesthetic, evanescent; they are only

strange
vehicles,

forms of
outlandish factories

carried by
sound through the air,

they stop at
the border,

which is no
sort of place;

then
they go back.(P55-87, p. 122)

Although ‘they come/out of a lesser world’, they offer an
approach to perceptual freedom: ‘I shall go with them sometimes/till the
journey dissolves under me’. (P55-87, p. 122)

Fisher has stated that the
‘political content’ of his work consists of ‘descriptions of consciousness,
reminders of the complexity of the perceptual mechanisms which show us the
world.’ 56 ‘For me,’ he adds, ‘it is the private memories and
private fantasies of individuals which actually create the public, social
world.’ 57 An art that consciously defamiliarizes breaks the false
perceptual automatism which habitualizes readers to a particular version of
social reality. In the fourth poem of the sequence there is yet another trip
unnamed between locations, one in which all that is solid melts into a world of
exchange that is not primarily economic:

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

I
would say to myself: I am on a number fifteen bus in Birmingham. I am familiar
with the sensibility of Paul Klee or Kokoschka but I’m not familiar with the
places they were at, but I’ll play some perceptual games and I will
de-Anglicize England – which seems to me absolutely essential.

The
only point of using any form is to create freedom forms and not to do things
about the imposition of order on chaos and this sort of rubbish.

As far as I see it, a poem has business to exist, really, if there’s a
reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having
read it or having used it. The poem is always capable of being a subversive
agent, psychologically, sensuously, however you like.

Sunday, March 19, 2017

The first review of Petrarch 3, published by Crater Press, may be read on Litterbug, here. It is by the excellent Alan Baker. (Read his answers to Edge Hill students' questions about his work here.) here.) Read more about Petrarch 3 and how to buy it here. And about about my Petrarch obsession (it's Wyatt's Petrarch at the moment (watch me at the end of my video here...

Thursday, March 16, 2017

don’t normally wear a suitdon’t normally wear a tienot at a reading(laughter)not when I’m reading poemsthat’s allAll poems (single catcall from audience at
disrobing)I knew you’d say somethingAll poems stage their meanings at a critical remove from their
occasions, sources, influences and poetics. Sometimes poems subvert such
complex and lucid notions as ‘complexity’ and ‘lucidity’, to produce poems that
are anything but complex and lucid in an attempt to re-define those
thingsIn
any case, poems … run ahead of the conjectures we makethe conjectures run ahead
of the poems at different timesI’m
going to readI’m going to turn this
into a brief poetry readingpartly
because I believe that the poetry reading is one of the provisional
institutions of linguistically innovative poetry or whatever you want to call
itand one of the functions of it
is to flog booksI thought I’d do
thatI have some books hereand there’s one thing freeand also there’s something else that’s
common withpoetry readingsthat’s athat’s a trip to the hostelry afterwardsI know there’s a bun-fight immediately
after thisbut
there could be an after afterI
think I will simply delegate the Buck I’ th’Vine as a possiblevenueso here are five poemsthey’re all metapoemsthey do what I was talking aboutthis is what I wrote for the Alan Halsey
reading here as part of the series Ailsa (Cox) and I run from the writing
departmentI decided to do a kind
of introduction for himI kind of
see this as you know when you go home and you find three answerphone messages
from the same personit also rhymes
andI tell students ‘rhyme is a crime’but they never quite get the irony of me
saying thatso I’ve got the maximum
number of rhymes

The Hello Poem

for Alan Halsey

Hello poem, it’s me again. I’m

the voice that lives upstairs. You

hear me reeling across my floor,

your ceiling, as I dance about my

affairs. And you about yours, not

miming my sound, un-

rhyming your eyes as they rise,

faltering, toward me, from the ground.

*

Hello poem, it’s me again, the

other side of your world,

speaking long distance

straight

around your curve, racing

like a tycoon’s jet

to overtake the dawn

and possess tomorrow.

*

Hello poem, it’s me again. You

ran away with yourself to

stage your new self’s forming. I am

the silence that inhabits your zero.

this is a poem called

Another Poem

The scribe of the poem knows nothing

but he embodies every word you hold.

He’s not an original. He’s a solid

conduit, form rather than wave or

particle. He’s left-handed, and his block

fist covers every word once it’s formed.

The eyes he turns to us

in his mirror

look away.

Careful not to smudge, he crouches low,

reversing the verse, furrowing his plough.

The poem tells of flowers and trees,

naming names you recognise from other

poems, but you could never make them out

in the wild. Did he say ‘Wild’? No,

he didn’t, as it happens. Neither did

the poem. You’re making it up. You think

it should be you alone and the words

agreeing to differ. But you watch his fist

pounding the lines: Snouts
nuzzling the moon

grass or Gifting broken gusts. The poem

has barely recovered from his scratches, yet

you’re making to scribble links in its margins,

calming and charmless. Will you then tear

his calligraphy back, peel it off to leave

the wounded poem yours, a dripping pelt?

He fashions the final words. Waves of feeling rush

towards this hooded moment. His dream is to be power-

less as the endless poem.

Then he

inscribes, in mirror-script: The scribe of this poem

knows it all

this is called ‘Not Another Poem’partly because it’s in proseand partly (laughs)through exasperationthis actuallyI made allusion to an essay I wrote on
the avant-gardethis is also part
of thatwhat I was attempting to do
was to write something that was neither
poetry or prose nor a critical article but it’s a response to that book but I’m
not sure you need to know that book

Not Another Poem

after Krzysztof Ziarek

Often I am permitted to return to a
field. And it is full of forces

Something is happening here, saying
whatever, but saying all the same. But not. The same there’s nothing to
exchange. No need to

Inside this field you are safe but
not safe. All that is the world is not. The world. A bullet flies as the idea
of a bullet (flies) but its trajectory is turned. To words like ‘sleet’ turning
to ‘snow’. To slow. It is a bullet that stands. In relation to every new thing

Everything here is transformed,
every thing (out there) interrupted. A snow-bulletfrozen mid-air becomes off-centre of a new
constellation from where we see it transfigured our selves. What we think of it
is the new thing

There’s more of it. And more and
more of it in a different way there’s nothing. We can do with what we find
here. It’s not stock. This is where. I want to make some thing. Something
elsed, but disavowed – disallowed, even – in this

A carafe, That Is a blue guitar.
Beyonding art

I don’t want to only make
relations. I make. The gangly girl in black-framed glasses in my making. I make
her trip back from her car to number 99 in her strappy party shoes to root out
the Christmas present she has forgotten. Then I will make the thoughts she has
as she returns

Outside of her there is domination.
House numbers telephone wires. Humming with Power. Not poetry and the
antinomies. Satellite navigation. Data shadow. Inside. They share the world is
not escaped, but elsed

Empower me to be. So unpowered. In
my relinquishment by distance not elevation to keep the saying unsaid. To speak
against is to speak. Let me do it I need to do it but let me speak something
elsed. From somewhere else. Of something

I have made something. For you. Now you are someone else

another poem which relates to a readingthis time I didn’t write it as an
introductionI wrote it the next
daywhen John James came here to
readhe has the poem with the line
‘I beg you to free this boy’ and I introduced him with the words ‘I beg you to
hear this boy’so I took this up
the next day whilst he was busily working with the second year students here I
wrote the poem for him

As Yet Untitled Poem

for John James

I beg you to hear this boy. And hear him out.

His morning poem you’re in, now,

is neatly creased as a crisp new shirt, stiff-

backed and clipped on its cardboard torso, posed.

It trips you over the cat from the film you’ve never

seen, as you search for your spectacles.

I use my enormous brain to seek the signals

they emit. We are both The Prisoner

on this island, Crusoes of overlapping surveillance.

Sleep is where we’ve come from, a misty place

of drizzled desire and mordant fear. The fog has

lifted, real enough, for the expedition that must

set off for the explanation. Your house-

guest, a sort of vapour that

an opening door dispels, coughs his soft pardons.

Serious poetry is back in town:

the Unfinished Alba of
the Unknown

Troubadour, whose vida
is word for word. The

beloved of this lyric is the hero of that epic, where

sometimes I did seek, I beg you now to flee this boy.

and my final onethis final one comes from this sequence
of metapoems but it also belongs in the ‘September 12’poem as wellI need to retreat behind here for the
use of my hands[2]it’s short

Reading ‘The Poem…’.

The poem sends itself from anywhere

to your little box there it replays it

over and over. No redial no recall.

Dead ears drop in your lap. Pause.

No reply possible, skip onto Message Two:

I can see the twin
cathedrals twisting below.

I should keep this
thing switched off it affects

the instruments it
doesn’t matter now terror

has been hijacked by
artifice. Commas cower

along Hope St as we
torque above them

out of control
spluttering towards the radio tower

full stop. That
was your fake captain speaking

through me printing fear backwards through his script.

You receive my wild meaning in his spliced last words

thank you(applause)thank you

[1] I have
attempted to transcribe the verbal introductions to these poems (in italics),
which includes me reading and abandoningprepared text (in ordinary type) before the lecture transforms into a
poetry reading. I have borrowed a number of transcription conventions from the
‘talk poems’ of David Antin.

[2] I cupped
my hands to make my voice more like an intercom as I read the italicised lines,
and needed to rest my text on the lectern I had read the lecture from. During
the poetry reading, after having removed my jacket and tie, I moved out into
the audience, swaying and moving as I read, as is my custom, advancing some way
up the aisle dividing the audience. So at the end of the performance I was back
in the position I started from.

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

Part One may be read here and Part Two here. Best read before this part

Doing Poetics

What I am going to read now comes
from my rather rough poetics ‘notebook’ – more a commonplace book - rather than
a composed and elegant ‘Journal’, like Middleton’s. It consists of unfinished
thinking in glimpses and gestures, pointing and naming. It is wasteful to reproduce
its dispersal and repetitions. I have therefore edited and re-arranged some of
its parts, and have re-written short passages, in the course of which its main
concerns become clearer, but it now reads very differently – to me – and I have
discerned patterns of yearning of which I was hitherto unaware, and which I
need to consider, perhaps, in the light of my future practice. You can hear me
talking to myself and, not surprisingly, you may lose me in places. This
doesn’t matter. I want you to feel what it is like to do poetics.

Jettisoned
along the way are asides on reading the ‘visionary metapoems’ of Paavo Haavikko
and Antonio Porta, the haiku-like dainas
of Latvia, some attempts at fresh poems, as well as plans to write a complete
fictional poet’s real poems (a project best left for another occasion, believe
me!). Notes which lead nowhere (yet) - such as ‘Idea: write 6 poems beginning
with the word “Between”’ - are also omitted. Curiously, there’s nothing about
my fiction writing, which is another story. The notes were made irregularly
between June 2005 and September 2006, during which time I turned 50.

What
I fear by making it public is exactly the diminution of its conjecturality, as
it were, that merely by filtering a comment from the scribble, it might assume
an authority it neither deserves, nor seeks, and that it will cease to be read
as poetics. It follows that this poetics should not be used in the attempt to
‘clarify’ or ‘focus’ the poems that follow. These are the dangers, but it is
one of my main contentions that we need to develop new ways of reading such a
discourse as a conjectural and primary investigation into the nature of
writing, which allow for its twisting and turning, ‘duckin’ and divin’’, and –
remember – the almost inevitable, and even deliberate, mismatch with the work
for which it acts as permission.

*

Unease, and not knowing quite how
to get going again, despite the success of the poetry and prose piece ‘Roosting
Thought’. Say, - of how lyrical I could become (that ‘I’ of course),
reading Jennifer Moxley. But also how visually disposed upon the page
(screen space, Barbara Guest), or how rhetorically flat (Mei Mei
Berssenbrugge).Or indeed how to deal with enjambement. Is syntax struggling
against prosody, sentence against line, as in Agamben’s agonistic formulation,
or struggling for their reconciliation? As Keston Sutherland rather abstractly
suggests: ‘Prosody is implicit cognition … manifest in poetic language as the
technical and unending dialectic of transgression and reconciliation’.[1] An
‘ever-compensated-for-falling’, as someone – Merleau Ponty? - described
walking?

Deleuze writes: ‘To the question,
“Who is speaking?” we answer sometimes with the individual (Classical),
sometimes with the person (Romantic), and sometimes with the ground that
dissolves both.’ Then he quotes Nietzsche: ‘The self of the lyric poet raises
its voice from the bottom of the abyss of being; its subjectivity is pure
imagination.’[2]

But my edition of The Birth of
Tragedy has Nietzsche saying: ‘The ‘I’ of the lyricist therefore sounds
from the depth of his being: its “subjectivity”, in the sense of modern
aestheticians is a fiction.’ [3] Which
would be a restatement of the ‘Romantic’. Roll on the ground that dissolves….

*

Why should the poem be ‘a form of
life’? (Joan Retallack) Why a model? Such a notion may destroy its efficacy.
Critique?

So in the deepest sense to discover
what poetry is. To rise beyond

the technical → social → ethical

(the ‘levels’ of textual analysis
in my book The Poetry of Saying). Conversely, start with the distinction between the ‘saying’ as quality and the
‘said’ as quality and to radiate out towards various textual strategies that enable ‘saying’, not just so-called
‘linguistically innovative’ ones.

which comes back to
my definition of ‘Writing’ in ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (1999), though
there it’s ironised, even comic, and quotes a poetics notebook of 1993:

Writing

both process and product, is a significant
and coherent deformation of the linguistic system with the power to reorder and
reconfigure individual, collective and social constructs of subjectivity, the
face to face encounter with alterity, which will assist the processes of
greater subjective autonomy and responsibility towards the other, as just one
example of a possible aestheticisation of politics to catalyze change in the
environmental, social, and psychological domains. [5]

*

I think of WS Graham, around 50,
reaching the apparent simplicity of Malcolm Mooney’s Land after
rhetorical excess. And of his rigorous self-editing.

Or of something like this? ‘The starkness
of this late vision … is paralleled by an aesthetic absoluteness that replaces
the earlier grammatical complexity with an uncomplicated syntax consisting
largely of declarative sentences and a purified style,’ as Edmund Keeley wrote
of Yannis Ritsos.[6] Not
those determinants in my case, of course, nor so ‘late’ I hope….

Or of thinking through the
implications of the footnote I added to my essay ‘A Carafe, a Blue Guitar,
Beyonding Art: Krzysztof Ziarek and the Avant-Garde’, when I surprised myself by
saying, ‘as a member (or past member) of one of these avant-garde groupings ….’:

‘The reason I ponder my possible
“past” membership of an avant-garde is not my fear that I’ve not kept up my
subscription, or that a modern-day Breton has expelled me for having a
bourgeois face or something, but that I feel geographically remote from the
centres of avant-garde practice, and that I’ve reached an age when perhaps
one’s poetics – which is hopefully still avant-garde in some sense - is
developed for the individual and less for the group, though I hope it is of use
[I would mean now “provocation”] to others. I’m frankly not looking over my
shoulder to see whether I adhere to the manifesto. The wolfish packing
mentalities of avant-gardes are their least attractive aspects, despite the
historical necessity of exclusivity and a decent supply of the drug of choice.’[7]

*

I read Douglas Oliver’s Whisper ‘Louise’…. He positions his own
art as non-mainstream and non ‘innovative’. He talks, though, of needing a
further dichotomy, that of the extremes of ‘clarity’ and ‘obscurity’ - not for his work to be located in the
middle (a third way poetics), which is where mediocrity lies, but to inhabit both ‘extremes’ at once. (He imagines
this geopoetically on a map of Paris, Heine and Celan the ‘extremes’.) I’m not
suggesting for one moment that there is a contradiction here, at all, but that
the two go together, at least in Doug’s mind.

The
work neither belongs to the avant-garde nor to the mainstream; it

belongs
to both the extremes of ‘positive … ballad-like poetry’ and

to
‘negative opaque and complex’ poetry

‘both
poles … are necessary’

the
positive is also ‘bravery in withstanding vicissitudes’; (WL 340)

but
is there no ‘also’ for the negative, the complex, no bravery
there?

so
why that polarity at all?

In
any case, a sense here of an individual positioning himself.

The
book is also trying to posit the positivities of Poetry: [Here I quote the
essentialist definitions of poetry I discussed earlier. I continue:] And, less
explicitly, but more complexly, poetry is related to an eidetic consciousness,
surrounded by the ‘humming’, the background ‘radiation’ of the universe. So
that:

‘In
life … the healthiest agents of a story’s collapse are love, justice, mercy and
hope. It takes love to understand’ death. (WL
423)

Kind.
Kindness. It all ends up as a series of abstract nouns, like Stefan Themerson’s
‘decency of means’. (Indeed both are trying to avoid the fanatic’s monomania… Philip
Roth’s I Married a Communist is
arguing something similar. Like Oliver, he sees personal heroisms amid both
personal and public stupidities (on both sides), the McCarthyite witch hunts
not too different a historical mess from the Paris Commune in Oliver’s
reading.). Yet neither of these is a ‘slogan’.

What
impresses me is the long-term/large-scale working out of these things. But with
the openness to know that he hasn’t the answers to some of the questions he
posits, whether his residual materialist scepticism about ‘eidetic consciousness’,
or about the 58 items on his list of undeniable ‘potentially disastrous
pathways’ for humanity.

What
is interesting is the sense of measuring all this against one’s death, though
he didn’t know he was dying when he began the book, out of some ethic for the
only life, the ‘one life’, the only earth. I think of The Three Ecologies of Guattari – but I remember that he (or
Deleuze, or both) is called a ‘bigot’ by Oliver in one of the few bigoted
moments of the book. I read that accusation sitting opposite Patricia reading
Deleuze [indeed, the influence of her researches are felt throughout this
notebook]. A post-Deluezean definition of the purpose of art hangs upon my study
wall:

‘Artworks … are not there to save
us or perfect us (or to damn or corrupt us), but rather to complicate things,
to create more complex nervous systems no longer subservient to the
debilitating effects of clichés, to show and release the possibilities of a
life.’ (John Rajchman) [8]

‘Release’ is suggestively dynamic here.

Also in that article on Krzysztof
Ziarek and the avant garde is some address to Utopianism. I know! I’ve run hot
and cold on that for a couple of decades. Doug only has the utopianism of his
‘subject’, Louise Michel, in his sights, as self-delusion. She was an anarchist
and willing to destroy human life to achieve her aims, like Blair even. But
unlike Oliver, or Levinas, or Ziarek, who have a basically pacficist ethos or
like Themerson, who sees only tragedy (‘Factor T’) facing the decency of means.[9]

But
Ziarek’s aesthetics - how he would hate that word - is a utopianism of sorts:
‘predicated on its ultimate success but guaranteed only by its inevitable
failure’ as I put it. I mean utopianism in, within, folded into, art.

Which
perhaps makes utopianism more powerful, so long as we remember with Adorno that
‘Art’s utopia is draped in black’.[10]

*

qualities of

lucidity

(with its connotations of

shining /transparency/easily
understood /intellectually brilliant

and

complexity

(with its connotations of

infolding/being composed of many
parts/intricate

rather than – say - ‘lucidity’ and
‘diversity’, as in Lyotard’s binary, borrowed from Malraux’s borrowings from
Valéry: ‘It befalls consciousness to assemble and unify diversity while
lucidity mercilessly trains a flash of light on the worst of it all.’[11]

or Oliver’s poles of ‘complexity’
and ‘obscurity’, or even Christopher Middleton’s attractive dyad for the poem
during composition, of ‘effervescence’ and ‘distillation’. (P 22) [12]

*

Christopher Middleton’s best poems

Stage their own meanings as they
unfold

The rhythm and lineation enact the
unfolding

They are joyful in their very
processes (like the singing of Sarah Vaughan, that sudden high-octane octave-leaping
swoop on ‘I’ll Never Be the Same’)

They mediate matter and mind;
consciousness

The language is precise but never
bookish (despite his reputation as a difficult writer. He’s written some of the
best poems about cats). Vernacular. Spoken

Most of Middleton’s poems begin in
the quotidian, from ‘starters’, technically speaking, but end somewhere else,
elsewither, elsewise. In short, that is their purpose, as embodied ecstasies.[13]

They are splendid – in the full
sense of the word – articulations of the human attempt to access Being, something
visionary, that integrates experience through experiences articulated. Many of
them unfold that articulation in their own artifices. The result: beauty as
well as splendour, even with negative experiences….

[I want to pause from my notebook
for a moment to play you a recording of Middleton reading his poem ‘Old
Bottles’.[14] It is
an early work, first published in the 1960s, demonstrating some of the qualities I list in the notebook. It seems to be an
oneiric poem, or a hypnogogic-into dream poem, but somehow it gives access to
deeper levels of dream that embody the deadliest moments of twentieth century
European history, especially through the resonant ‘isolable specific’ of the striped
pyjamas. Indeed, one of Middleton’s ‘negative’ experiences against which he
will measure any poem is his ‘first sight of a person recently liberated from a
KZ’ in 1945. (P 103) It represents, I
suppose, ‘lucidity mercilessly train(ing) a flash of light on the worst of
it all’, in Lyotard’s phrase, but I find it a curiously haunting and uplifting
poem, possibly through the narrator’s final deep-sleep habilitation and escape.

Old Bottles

It must have been long

I lay awake,

listening to the shouts

of children in the wood.

It was no trouble, to be awake;

not to know

if that was what I was.

But I had to buy

old bottles, barter

for steerage, candles too,

each stamped with my name.

It was hurry hurry

racing the factory canal toward

the town of the kangaroo.

Up the street I came

across a knot of dead boys.

In the room with a flying bird

on practising my notes

I found its lingo;

my body knew

those torsions of the cat.

She came by, that girl,

she said it’s to you, to you

I tell what they are doing

in South Greece and Germany.

My parents killed, brother gone,

They’ll read this letter, I’ll

not be here, you do not understand.

In my striped pyjamas

I was not dressed for the journey.

I changed into padded zip

jacket, boots, canvas trousers,

my pockets bulged with the bottles

I was carrying the candles,

and I ran and I ran.]

*

Multitopics

Deleuze says, in The Logic of
Sense, ‘Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and
has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.’[15] Not
to be the ‘creature of resentment’ (Nietzsche again) but ‘the free man who
grasps the event, and does not allow it to be actualised as such without
enacting.’ [16]

Muslim resentment shouldn’t drive
British foreign policy, neither should it be ignored. It’s disastrous in its
own right, needs changing because it is immoral.

The free enquiry into culture/
language/ text/ science/ art not tied to theocracy in any form (whose paradox
is that it is man-made, illusory, my last laugh). To create more complex
nervous systems. Enlightenment and post-enlightenment values alike. Against the
meganarrative.

An ethics of responsibility to the Other,
as in Levinas’ thought. ‘And I say we should all be conditioned and educated to
regard violence in any form as something to be ruthlessly mocked.’ (Muriel
Spark) [17]

Not to be unworthy of what happens
to us, to not curtail our civil liberties, or academic freedom and democracy,
for example, to not answer terror with error. The greatest defence is the free
use of the faculties that are being defended.

A commitment to the only earth we
have. The three ecologies. Multitopia: ‘there is always another town within the
town.’ (Deleuze) [18] Velopolis.
Dissensus as well as consensus.

The necessity of Atheism? Brightness
is all. In the face of William Empson’s ‘Torture Monster’ and his death
suckers. Religiomania as a mania. At
its outer limit: ‘Fundamentalism is a kind of necrophilia, in love with the
dead letter of a text.’ (Eagleton)[19]
The last recorded words of a suicide bomber, his fear of historical and human contingency:
‘If I sit here I will commit sins.’

Species solidarity and a dispersal
of subjectivities, subjectivation. A sense of humanness that has to come from a
shared ‘awareness of human frailty and unfoundedness’ (Eagleton) [20] –
of potential wounding – and hurt, and
sexualities, and not from ‘humanism’, as that has evolved. We must ‘keep faith
with the open-ended nature of humanity, and this is a source of hope.’
(Eagleton) [21]

*

This is, remember, a spring-cleaned
and tidied up version of my intermittently written notebook. As I understand
it, it offers speculations on, conjectures about, the effects of finding myself
an older writer with an avant-garde heritage, and with a deep sense of a damaged
utopian project for writing, as well as claiming a more generalised neurological
function for art; a writer with an uncertain sense of how questions of prosody,
lyricism and the lyric ‘I’ will play out in his future writing. It re-discovers
my older definition of ‘Writing’ itself, which is consonant with a more recent
formulation (though they are not the words I would use now). Remember my 80th
definition of poetics: to come upon that which one already knows, but with the
force of revelation as if discovered for the first time. Preferred qualities of
writing – emulating the binary thinking of Oliver and Middleton and others –
are expressed in terms of tensions between complexity and lucidity. Other
qualities are detected in the work of other writers, as is common in poetics,
in this case, in Middleton’s, and, although I don’t say it – don’t need to – I
am weighing these qualities against my own practice. Merely stating them as
kinds of provisional benchmark may alter my poetic trajectory.

But
the last section, ‘Multitopics’, is different. Again, the tidying up for you
has hardened the outline of the conjectures, softened the fuzzy logics of
poetics, and it’s not possible to tell whether that is productive or not for
the actual poems. In this case, it projects, in an unusually direct way, the
still-to-to-be-written fourth sequence of 24 poems called September 12 after the frozen state of emergency we are living
through at the moment. These notes probably test out the content of that sequence – I can’t imagine not using the quotation from the suicide bomber, or the rhyme of
‘terror’ and ‘error’ – and perhaps they exceed my definitions of poetics
because of that; they are about what,
not how, writing is made. All I can
say is that the limits of poetics, the limitations on its scope, is yet again
one of the projected areas of study for those of us involved in Creative
Writing as an academic discipline.

@

Part four of the lecture may be read here:
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/robert-sheppard-inaugural-lecture-part_16.html

[9] See
Themerson, S. (1972) Factor T, London: Gaberbocchus. One
example of Factor T is our dislike of killing being matched by the necessity of
doing it. I promised in footnote 1 that Themerson would re-appear.

[10] Adorno,
TW, Aesthetic Theory. I have been
unable to re-locate this quotation.

[12] I find
that Borges, in one of his introductions to a volume of his poems, The Self and the Other, puts his finger
on both the question of writerly development and the nature of the preferred
model of complexity: ‘The fate of the writer is strange. He begins his career
by being a baroque writer, pompously baroque, and after many years, he might
attain if the stars are favourable, not simplicity, which is nothing, but
rather a modest and secret complexity.’ in Borges, J. (1999), Selected Poems, New York: Viking, 149.

[13] I am
pleased to find Jeremy Hooker expressing it thus: ‘If Middleton’s poems are
journeys or voyages of imagination, they also move by “turns” or “leaps”.’
Hooker, J. ‘Habitation for a Spirit: The Art of Christopher Middleton’, Chicago Review, 51:1/2, Spring 2005, 60-70, at
68. This article is one of the best pieces of writing on Middleton. It comes
from a special feature on Middleton’s work in Chicago Review..

[14] The
recording may be heard in and the text may be read on (1995) CD Poets 2London: Bellew Publishing. The text appears
in Middleton, The Word Pavilion and
Selected Poems, 140-41. In the former, the word ‘They’ll’ in line 27 is
given – and read – as the less-effective ‘they’.